Chapter-4

EXPERMENTATION

Contents
Issues in experimentation Experimental designs Experimental environment Types of experimental designs

EXPERIMENTATION
An experiment refers to the process of manipulating one or more variables and measuring their effect on one or more variables, while controlling the external variables. The variable, which is manipulated , is called the independent variable and the variable whose behavior is to be measured in the experiment is called dependent variable.

Contd..
A well executed experiment can depict the causal relationship between variables by controlling extraneous variables. To conduct experiments successfully, researchers have to consider certain aspects which include treatment, experimental groups and control of extraneous variables.

ISSUES IN EXPERIMENTATION
There are four key issues a researcher has to consider while conducting an experiment. Treatment of independent variables Experimental groups and control groups Selection and measurement of the dependent variable Control of extraneous variables

Experimental Validity
Validity is the extent to which a research process is accurate and reflects actual market conditions. There are two types of validity which are considered in experimentation. Internal validity External validity

Internal Validity
Internal validity measures to what extent the change in a dependent variable can be explained by the independent variable. Internal validity refers to the approximate validity with which we infer that a relationship between two variables is causal or that absence of a relationship implies the absence of cause. contd..

Contd..
The influence of extraneous variables should be included to improve the experiments internal validity. The following are seven major types of extraneous variables that are sources of threat to internal validity. History Maturation Testing Instrumentation Selection bias Statistical regression Mortality

External Validity
External validity measures to what extent the inferences derived from experiments can be generalized to the real environment. External validity refers to the the approximate validity with which we can infer that the presumed causal relationship can be generalized to and across alternate measures of the cause and effect and across different types of persons, settings, and times

Experimental Environment
Experiments are conducted in: Laboratory Environment Field Environment The first one means the experiment is conducted under artificial conditions. The second one refers to conducting an experiment in real conditions.

Types of Experimental Designs

The experimental designs are classified into four categories: Pre-Experimental Designs

True Experimental Designs

Quasi-Experimental Designs Statistical Designs

Pre-Experimental Designs
Pre-experimental designs lack proper control mechanisms to deal with the influence of extraneous variables on experimental results. There are three prominent preexperimental designs used by business researchers: One-shot design (after only design) One-group pre-test-post-test design Static group design

True Experimental Design

True experimental designs use randomization to control the influence of extraneous variables. The following are prominent true experimental designs widely used in business research: Pre-test-post-test control group design Post-test-only control group design Solomon four group design

Quasi-experimental Designs
Quasi-experimental designs are used when it is not possible to assign test units randomly to experimental treatments or assign experimental treatment randomly to test units. Prominent quasi-experimental design used by researches is: Time-series designs

Statistical Designs
Statistical Designs aid in measuring the effect of more than one independent variable. They help in isolating the effects of most extraneous variables, thereby providing better experimental results. Four prominent experimental designs are: Completely randomized design Randomized block design Latin square design Factorial design